I focus almost exclusively on PvP, whether solo, small gang, or large bloc warfare. In the past, I've been a miner, mission runner, and faction warfare jockey. I'm particularly interested in helping high-sec players get into 0.0 combat.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Searching for the Structure Fight

I’m an odd sort. I spend my game
time like Diogenes with his lamp, looking for an honest engagement. I’m very particular about the kind of PvP
that I enjoy. I try to keep in mind that
I’m intentionally choosy about my content.
I want high-quality content, and I’m willing to spend a lot of time to
achieve it. On the other hand, there’s a
lot of PvP content I find of little value.
Thousands of those kills don’t balance out even one great fight.

But I wanted to share a little about myself to help you understand what
I mean.

I play chess. A lot. Since replacing my phone four months ago, I’ve
logged 629 games of chess on “Chess with Friends”. The rules are simple, but when you include
all the meta tricks and psychological warfare involved, it becomes an intense, personal
game. I feel ashamed and undressed when
my strategy is dismantled, and it pushes me to innovate new ways to respond. Recently, I’m on a French Defense kick, which
I’ve found to be incredibly powerful. I’ve
even started being able to beat the computer on level 5 of 6 recently.

I take chess very seriously, and refuse to play with people I
know. I can’t, then still be friends
with them. I play a very aggressive,
demoralizing game. I set people up to
think they’re winning, only to spring my trap and shatter their hopes. I cut people apart piece by piece to
demoralize them. My goal isn’t just to
win, it’s to cut their heart out as I do, so I have an advantage the next time
I play them.

When I’m being beaten, though, I try to calm myself. I get myself caught in a fork and lose my
queen in exchange for a knight. I take a
deep breath and keep going. I don’t resign
unless a) I really need to go, or b) my opponent has demonstrated that he knows
how to take advantage of his overwhelming lead, and the rest of the game is
truly academic. Losing a queen isn’t an
immediate resignation. In fact, I look
to trade queens as early as possible because I’m much stronger with my
ancillary pieces than my queen, the opposite of most players.

I watched a movie a few months ago that got me interested in the Red
Baron. In the movie, it depicted Manfred
von Richthofen as adhering to a strict code of attacking only pilots who could
shoot him back, and that he never attacked pilots once they had crash-landed,
or who were injured and attempting to disengage. That appealed to me. You can imagine my
surprise when I learned that the real von Richthofen would exploit any tactical
advantage he could, including shooting pilots – not planes – on the ground and
finishing off wounded enemies. I still
respected his innovation of hiding his attack vector in the sun, though.

Chivalry, the pirate’s code, the word of a noble, the busido code… each
time I heard of these codes of beavhior, I was fascinated by their adherents…
until I learned that the reality was far more mundane. Chivalry never existed. Pirates would happily murder each other. Nobles lied all the time. Samurai would murder all sorts of people
without cause. Each of these supposedly
honorable codes were simply myths. I
took that very hard.

I enjoy poker, and I’ve written about how it compares to Eve
before. You have to be careful, effectively
gauging the actual strength of your opponent before you cross your
Rubicon. It’s an intensely complicated
game, prone to disruption by any idiot with a stack of chips. And that makes it delightfully unpredictable.

In Star Trek, I felt the Maquis were right. The Federation had abandoned them and their
principles for the sake of convenience.
I respected the fact that they scrounged, stole, and invented their own
strike craft. I don’t blame them at all
for their attempts to poison the atmospheres of former human worlds to force
the Cardassians out, while leaving it safe for humans to breathe. That seemed eminently sensible to me,
particularly in light of what was clearly Cardassian brutality. My heart was always with them. They didn’t deserve to be slaughtered like
cattle by the Dominion.

You see, for me, the struggle defines the satisfaction. I’m not interested in automata. Fifty should always crush 10. There’s no honor in being part of the fifty…
you’re expected to defeat the 10, and you only have room for shame by
failing. But if you’re one of the 10 and
you can find your way to victory, you’re actually accomplished something
worthwhile.

I don’t get that dopamine drip from empty accomplishment. But when I’m flying a Merlin and I see a T3D I’m
soloing explode… that’s intensely satisfying.
Or when my gang of six or seven scatters a gang of 15 while under
fire. I feel as if we’ve accomplished
something deserving of pride. When my
hands are shaking and I can feel the adrenaline surging through my body as
either myself or my opponent’s ship explodes… it’s delight. The experience is what matters, not the
result.

Twenty pilots dropping on a single T3 cruiser? The logical conclusion is that the T3 was
destroyed. Shame on you if you didn’t
kill it. There’s no skill in that for
the victors. The Persians did not take anything
positive out of Thermopylae. And Xerses
is remembered as a buffoon.

That’s my ideal. It’s not one I
always fulfill, or I always find, but that’s what I’m looking for. A lot of players might call it stupid. “Why do you take a fight if you know you’ll
lose?” “If you don’t use links, you’re
basically giving up at the start.” “You
can’t find fights like that anymore.”

Then again, a lot of players believe the value lies in the record of
victories. For me, it doesn’t. It lies in experiencing a meaningful victory. Without context, any trophy is
meaningless. I’d rather earn eighth
place than be given first. It’s the clawing
through mud, fighting against your own stupid habits and biases, and overcoming
everything they throw at you that provides the greatest satisfaction.

I’m not the best PvPer out there.
And I don’t have to be to be satisfied.
I just need to keep looking for the “structure fight”, where one leaves
on fire and the other doesn’t leave at all.
That’s enough.

It’ll never end. There’s no
achieving that goal, no ending that search.
Because, you see, the value lies in the searching, not the destination.

7 comments:

Magnificent! One of the best reads I've read on the nature of PvP in EVE and in general! I see something in EVE that other games can't have, a game where even as the loser you can have "fun", the level of mastery and thinking the game asks for makes that every fight can give you an opportunity to "fight well" but at the same time losing is still something meaningful. I wish EVE would more to promote that aspect of its PvP instead of the griefing aspect...

How about a followup to this? Share some of your favorite moments, what led up to them, how you stumbled onto it or hunted it down? Like your previous commenters, this piece struck me in a place that resonates very loudly and I'd love to see how you've accomplished your most valued experiences in New Eden.

Expanding your chess reference. Imagine that you frequent a local chess club. Casual play and friendly atmosphere. You can drop in and get a game because the members are comparable strength. After a time, a group of masters join. Now its some professional play with a smug undertone. Your defeats are publicly published and ridiculed. An immediate tactic would be avoid engaging the masters. The game changes, a few of the masters now capture all of the opponents pieces - way past the point that check-mate. "I am making legal moves and my opponent can resign at anytime". "well maybe this game is not for you, draughts is in the next room down the hall".

This is what Eve has become. A place with a sub-set of players that conduct the game professionally. When many just desire a casual, relaxed standard. Not much point to make a challenge which cannot be won.

That's a good point, and it's one of the reasons I really like the jump fatigue and "farm your fields" sov concepts: it regionalizes superpowers. You've got a bully on the block? Well, under Fatigue and FozzieSov, that bully is going to be (mostly) bottled up in one part of space: just stay away from there and you'll be fine.

And let's face it, the bully everyone's talking about now that N3 collapsed is the Imperium. And it's been probably a good year since the line members enjoyed a really good, major invasion. They're becoming less frequent, even as the content for smaller entities increases and expands. That's a good change in my book.

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